Every cybersecurity team is being challenged to do more with less. CISOs experience top-down pressure to maximize the value of their resources, consolidate vendors as much as possible, and optimize their tool stack. And, they have unchanged expectations of keeping their organization safe across ever-growing digital supply chains.
But traditional approaches to VRM often leave cybersecurity teams grappling with a tangled web of manual processes, disparate tools, and fragmented data. Have you noticed how many decentralized tools and manual tasks are involved in vendor risk assessments and third-party risk management programs?
From chasing vendors to have them fill out lengthy security questionnaires to periodic reassessments, continuous monitoring, and risk mitigation upon security events—teams spend hours dealing with things that could easily be taken off their plate with better and more integrated workflows.
And what would that look like in reality?
With the recent launch of a fully integrated Vendor Risk Management experience within the Bitsight portal, our approach combines risk assessment workflow automation and our network of 40,000+ vendor profiles with Bitsight’s breadth of cyber risk data, continuous monitoring, and third-party vulnerability response capabilities—all in one place.
By embracing integration and automation across these functions in one platform, you can pave the way for a more proactive and resilient approach to vendor risk management. This unified platform empowers organizations to assess vendors faster and with greater confidence, while unlocking positive business outcomes.
How integrated VRM can make your TPRM program more efficient
1. Saving time and resources
Resource bandwidth is something most companies and security teams watch carefully. However, the amount of vendor assessments to perform only increases as your business grows and engages with more third parties.
Adding human capital adds costs, but optimizing processes to be more efficient reduces costs. Automation can empower your team to do more with the same resources, and use that extra time to focus on higher value activities. Many manual tasks can be automated: kicking off the intake of vendor data, managing reassessment reminders and notifications, detecting overdue or missing security artifacts, and even reacting to emerging zero days.
Think of how much time your team spends on third party risk assessments and administrative tasks that feel like “check-in-the-box” duties instead of risk mitigation efforts. Now think how you would relocate those hours into more strategic projects related to cybersecurity, privacy, compliance, certifications, audits, and more.
Utilizing a third-party risk management tool that streamlines, centralizes, and automates many of the tasks involved in the vendor risk assessment process can increase VRM efficiency up to 75% (as told by our customers).
2. Staying ahead of emerging threats and vulnerabilities
Third-party security issues may suddenly happen anytime during your relationship with a vendor. But your team can’t spend 100% of their time looking for red flags.
Continuous monitoring and real-time alerts can be the difference between business as usual and operational risk—with SolarWinds and MOVEit as the latest reminders of the impact supply chain attacks can have. In addition, the ability to promptly react to new vulnerabilities and zero days and initiate vendor outreach to assess and minimize their impact is key.
3. Facilitating compliance with industry regulations
A vendor management tool facilitates all the necessary processes to make sure you comply with industry and government requirements across your supply chain. Custom tags and sets of requirements allow you to ask each vendor for exactly what you need, as opposed to subjecting all of them to the same questions, and continuously monitor vendor security controls. You can also leverage your audit trail for auditing purposes.
This makes it easier to prioritize and categorize your vendors in regards to compliance with privacy standards like GDPR or CCPA, industry-specific standards like PCI or HIPAA, local regulations such as SEC in the US or NIS2 and DORA in the EU, or specific documentation such as SOC 2 reports, CAIQ, or SIG Lite questionnaires.
4. Providing third-party risk insights to make business decisions
In VRM, the concept of ‘trust but verify’ alludes to complementing subjective questionnaires and point-in-time snapshots with objective data. Data leads to good insights, and good insights drive strategic action.
Security ratings and benchmarking have quickly become a valuable tool to communicate and discuss business risk with shareholders, boards, and regulators, as they provide an objective and comparable measurement of risk across entire sectors and industries on an ongoing basis. For instance, Bitsight security ratings and analytics enable business leaders to understand their organization’s security performance across 23 different risk vectors and compare it to hundreds or thousands of peers to gauge their stance.
Focus on Delivering Quick and Easy Wins
As organizations embrace the cloud and hybrid working models, they are looking for more than budget optimization. They are looking for flexibility, ease of contracting, and rapid provisioning. With the threat of heightened exposure, regulatory non-compliance, and potential legal ramifications, the stakes couldn't be higher.
With the right end-to-end third-party risk management solution, your program will be up and running quickly so you can start delivering results—not just reducing risk, but also proving the value of your investments.